OSDev.org

Hi,
My OS is able to detect all device which are attached to the PCI Bus. And if I find datasheets I'm able to write drivers for these devices. But what if I don't find datasheets (alldatasheet.com and so on)?
So is there a possibility to do "Reverse Engineering" with a windows driver for a device I have? And if not what can I do?
Where get the Linux community device information from? I know that Intel often has OpenSource drivers and / or good documents about there products so it's easy to write drivers for them, but what about the other manefactures?

Thx!

Hi,

Linux is large enough to get some cooperation from hardware manufacturers - lots of companies donate their own code (IBM, Intel, AMD, NVidea, ATI, etc). IMHO the bigger your OS is, the more likely it is you'll get a little cooperation from hardware manufacturers.

I'd be tempted to consider where your time is best spent - you could spend years reverse engineering something like a video driver in the hope of supporting a product made by a company that doesn't care about it's end-users enough to provide full documentation, or you could spend the same amount of time writing 10 device drivers that do have documentation (and then use those 10 device drivers to show other hardware manufacturers that your project is worth their time).


Cheers,

Brendan

Welcome to the world of OS Dev. The best you can do is try and use the info from the linux drivers as best you can, other than that, stick to writing drivers for well documented devices.